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USS Philadelphia (SSN-690) collision in 2005


zsmith
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I was on the USS Philadelphia in 2005 when we were involved in a collision. We were doing a surface transit at night into Bahrain and a Turkish merchant ship was mistaken for a stationary rig. By the time the ship's control party finally realized that it was in fact a ship, it had turned and was headed on a course straight at us. We were not running sub ID lighting due to security concerns in the area we were operating. The merchant thought we were going to give way and ended up running over us. The merchant got stuck on top of the sub and our fairwater plane put a huge gash down their side just above the water line. We got pushed down far enough that my friend who was standing watch in control was about to start cutting cables running through the hatch to the bridge so that he could shut the watertight hatch before the bridge watch informed him that we were not going to get any deeper in the water. My chief, another mechanic, and I ended up having to open the aft main ballast tank vents by hand in order to sink the aft end of the sub enough that we could separate from the merchant ship. I was involved in several casualty situations during my career on submarines but this was by far the scariest one.

 

Fast forward 11 years and I'm at my parents house helping them clean up after the historic flooding in Louisiana a couple of weeks ago. I came across this letter that was sent to my mother after the 2005 collision. I didn't even know they had sent this.

 

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Here's a photo showing some of the damage. The friction was so intense that it actually melted some of the cleats. I have a chunk of metal that I found topside that I saved as a souvenir.

 

The Philly was a DDS boat (she normally had a shelter on back for SEAL ops). We had removed the shelter before deployment... had it been there right where the merchant hit us things would have been MUCH worse. We normally ran with the hatch seen in this photo open while the shelter was in place. Had the merchant hit the shelter it would have surely caused enough damage to compromise the watertight integrity of that shelter and sea water would have been able to pour down the open hatch.

 

post-109234-0-50449900-1472741066_thumb.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

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